Something else that is almost necessary to ensure success is for your company to help facilitate remote employees.
Things like:
Keeping conversations that involve remote employees in Slack instead of in-person.
Regular video calls. We have a daily developers meeting, and a weekly team meeting. I've been surprised how much you can pick up a person's mannerisms over video call. It means I've gone a couple years without meeting coworkers in person without realizing it, because I already feel like I know them.
Schedule time to get to know each other. Our weekly team meeting involves each person sharing three personal wins from the last week, something that was learned, and status on a habit you're working to develop. The meeting is also a chance to get updates on things happening in the company.
Regularly bringing all remote employees into the office for an event.
Encourage pair-programming with screen sharing. Since those of us remote can't just walk up to another employee to ask a question, we regularly hop on Zoom to do a screen share and talk through a problem.
A shared calendar for everyone to post when they will be out of the office.
I'm sure there's more, but these are a few things our company does that I feel really help me to feel involved.
Something else that is almost necessary to ensure success is for your company to help facilitate remote employees.
Things like:
I'm sure there's more, but these are a few things our company does that I feel really help me to feel involved.
Oh, and I also have the same problem of being in a different time zone. I have trained my coworkers to always add a timezone when they write a date
Yeah absolutely. +1 on all of this.
I use a Text Expander snippet so I never forget to add the Time Zone. My snippet even knows when PSD changes to PST.